The draft notice shown here that is dated June 17, 1918, was issued to Roy S. Fisk to induct him into the United States military service. The notice informs Fisk that he is to report to his local draft board on June 26, 1918. Fisk served during the latter half of World War I as an Army cook with Company C, 131st Engineers, American Expeditionary Forces and was stationed in Le Mans, France.

Description: This item from the University Archives served as notice that Charles Lewis Price was deemed fit to pilot aircraft in the United States Marine Corps Reserve. Price was born in 1923 in Charlotte, NC where he attended King’s Business College before enlisting in the United States Navy in 1942. Trained as a Naval Aviator, Price served as an active and reserve Marine Corps officer until 1953. He joined the faculty of East Carolina College in 1957, teaching in the Department of History until his retirement in 1983. He was honored that same year with the granting of emeritus status for his years of dedicated service.

Description: With Fall approaching, many are visiting the beach for the last time this season. One tourist attraction at the North Carolina coast is the Bodie Island Lighthouse. Located south of Nags Head, the current Bodie Island Lighthouse was built in 1872. Two other Bodie Island Lighthouse structures, no longer in existence, were built in 1847 and 1859. Today’s structure stands 150 feet tall and has a signal that’s visible for 19 miles. The Bodie Island Lighthouse recently underwent a massive 3-year, $5 million restoration. It reopened in April 2013, and the public can now climb all 214 steps to the top of the lighthouse to enjoy the views of the Outer Banks.

This undated image of the Bodie Island Lighthouse was taken by Jan Sellers Coward of eastern North Carolina. For other images of eastern North Carolina, see the Jan Sellars Coward Collection (#1112), East Carolina Manuscript Collection, J. Y. Joyner Library.

Description: Minnie Bell Parker lived most of her adult life in Norfolk, Virginia, after being born October 10, 1881, in Wilson Co., N.C. She was a nurse and during World War I she was a nurse with the American Expeditionary Force in France. After the war she was active in the American Legion and this colorful 40-year continuous membership certificate was presented to her on June 24, 1960. She died in Raleigh, N.C., on July 5, 1976. To see a scrapbook she kept while in France during World War I, go here https://digital.lib.ecu.edu/24594.

This deed, survey and plat seen above, dated 25 September 1799, granting 240 acres of land in Bladen County, North Carolina to Thomas Smith, was signed by North Carolina Governor Richard Dobbs Spaight, who also signed the U. S. Constitution. Spaight (1758 – 1802) was North Carolina’s 8th governor after American independence. The first native-born American to be elected Governor, he served three one-year terms, 1792 – 1795. Born in New Bern to the son of a colonial official, Spaight was educated in Ireland and Scotland. He returned to America to serve as an aide to American General Richard Caswell, during the Revolutionary War, 1778 – 1781.

After the Revolution, Spaight served as a representative from North Carolina in the Continental Congress, 1782 – 1785, and in the North Carolina House of Commons, 1785 – 1788, where he became Speaker of the House. In 1787 he became a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. He was only 29 when he signed the document.

During his term as Governor, Raleigh was chosen as the site for the new State Capitol and Chapel Hill was chosen as the site for the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. As governor, Spaight was also the chair of the first UNC Board of Trustees. Spaight died in 1802 as the result of an wound sustained in a duel at New Bern with his bitter political rival, Federalist John Stanly. Spaight’s son, Richard Dobbs Spaight, Jr. (1796 – 1850) served as both congressman, 1823 – 1825, and governor, 1835 – 1836; his grandson, Richard Spaight Donnell (1820 – 1867) served as a congressman from North Carolina, 1847 – 1849.

Special note: This blog post was written by Tim Buchanan, M.A. ’15, East Carolina University Department of English, as part of a special series highlighting the Stuart Wright Collection

While browsing the Stuart Wright Collection a few weeks ago, I saw mention of a collection of illustrations by Tom Wolfe. Best known for chronicling the 60s counterculture in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Wall Street excesses in The Bonfire of the Vanities, Wolfe is also known by his trademark white suit, which he wears like a uniform. I hadn’t expected to find works by this still-living author in the archive, and this item presented me with a facet of his work I never knew existed. They’re a fitting introduction to the Tom Wolfe Papers held at ECU, which also include an uncorrected proof of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

The book of illustrations is titled In Our Time, and was published in 1980 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. It compiles a series of Wolfe’s sketches, caricatures and accompanying essays, which originally appeared as a monthly feature in Harper’s Magazine with the same title. The book chronicles the narcissism and excess of the 1970s, offering an interesting glimpse at the sexuality, drug culture, and gender politics of the time from Wolfe’s perspective. In the first paragraph of the first essay, “Stiffened Giblets,” Wolfe describes his entry into the decade:

For me the 1970s began the moment I saw Harris, on a little surprise visit to the campus, push open the door of his daughter Laura’s dormitory room. Two pairs of eyes popped up in one of the beds, blazing like raccoons’ at night by the garbage cans . . . illuminating the shanks, flanks, glistening haunches, and cloven declivities of a boy and girl joined mons-to-mons. Harris backed off, on little step after another. He looked as if he were staring down the throat of a snake. He pulled the door shut, ever so gingerly (3).

The book also shares its title with Ernest Hemingway’s very first story collection, published in 1925.

Of further interest to researchers interested in Wolfe’s work is a comb-bound, uncorrected proof of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test bearing Wolfe’s signature. This is a far more modern––even postmodern––glimpse into the age or contemporary writings than the mention of a literary archive might bring to mind. The bound galleys are meant to give an idea of what the text will look like in print as well as the overall layout of the book. Some passages are crossed out by Wolfe’s own hand, so it’s possible to see bits of writing that didn’t make it into the final shelf copy.

Wolfe helped pioneer a new approach to journalism, called New Journalism, which blended literary technique with more traditional reporting. Among his contemporaries in the style were Joan Didion and Hunter S. Thompson. Because of his importance to modern writing, it is no surprise that we aren’t the only ones looking to archive Wolfe’s work. The New York Public Library has just processed a collection of his works and some selections are on display in “Becoming the Man in the White Suit: The Tom Wolfe Papers.”

Finding such well-known and contemporary writing among other, more obscure texts is a special thrill of working in the archive. Turning the long brittle sheets of the corrected proofs of a collection of his essays or the bound set of galleys to one of Wolfe’s most famous works, I felt that the archive itself was a living, unfinished thing not just shining a light on our literary past, but grounding those who explore within it to a strong on-going literary tradition.

Special note: This blog post was written by Edward Reges, M.A. ‘16, East Carolina University Department of English, as part of a special series highlighting the Stuart Wright Collection.

Richard Eberhart, Pulitzer Prize recipient and Poet Laureate of the United States from 1959 – 1961, is recognized as a dualistic poet; his poetry often featured two extremes in harmony, be they life and death or will and psyche. It is quite possible that the early days of his college career at Dartmouth College offered Eberhart a foundation for his understanding of the world and his creative identity. The Stuart Wright collection at Joyner Library has thirty eight boxes of Eberhart material, from poems and proofs to naval papers, calendars, photographs, and audio recordings.

Eberhart described philosophy as the “sum total of human knowledge as an outcome of the interpretation of the universe in one’s mind” in a paper written for his introduction to philosophy course in the spring semester of 1924. Stuart Wright obtained this paper and several others a young Eberhart wrote for this course. These papers depict a young man coming to terms with how he interprets the universe, and coincidentally, how he expresses himself. I have pulled from three of these papers, one on each of the prominent philosophical theories of mind, to demonstrate Eberhart’s reasoning.

The popular philosophy of mind in the 1920s, when Eberhart was a student at Dartmouth, was likely idealism. Put bluntly, idealism is the philosophy that everything we are and experience is an idea. Idealism is often seen as a dreamy outlook, and Eberhart seems to agree: “Intuition is a dream; thought must be the dream of that dream” (5).

Materialism, however, is the polar opposite of idealism. Backed by the consistency of science and observation, this theory claims that not only are the objects located in the external world that cause our experiences physical, but also our thought processes, experiences, and awareness are physical byproducts of a functioning nervous system. Eberhart refutes this theory by identifying ethically questionable motives for materialism: to break tradition and to control the external world. In his words, materialism focuses on “mental emancipation from the super-situation and false credulity of unproven gods and practice because it arises out of a desire to control the external world” (1). Eberhart dismissed materialism in part because he disliked its determinism, and believed instead that free will was the underlying principle of the physical form (Karthikeyan & Dwivedi, 226).

Eberhart combines his understanding of idealism and materialism to come to a conclusion in a third paper on substance dualism: the idea that reality consists of both physical and mental substances. The following excerpt from page 3 of his paper on dualism explains his position:

This dedication to a dualistic philosophy shows through in Eberhart’s works. As Karthikeyan and Dwivedi point out in their article “Richard Eberhart’s Poetic Theory: Art and Craft,” the poet believed that poetry is divided into an art and a craft, and used his craft to contribute to the art under the pretense that minds were divided into the physical will and the mental psyche. Karthikeyan and Dwivedi, on page 226, assert that Eberhart’s “psyche poetry pertains to the soul, to peace, quiet tranquility, serenity, harmony, stillness and silence. It provides psychic states of passive pleasure,” while “will poetry exists because of the power in the cell beyond its energy to maintain itself, ‘will’ results in action through zeal, volition, passion, determination, choice and command.”

It is a rare opportunity to see the reasoning behind a poet’s style and works. The Stuart Wright Collection in the Joyner Library offers explanations and personal correspondence that cannot be obtained with a Google search. For those interested, more items in the Eberhart papers, including a hand-inked autobiography of his early life and his philosophical analyses of Shakespearean literature, can be found in the Stuart Wright Collection Finding Aids, along with a short biography of his very interesting life.

Few could hope to have such an accomplished life as Robert Penn Warren. Three time Pulitzer Prize winner and the first Poet Laureate of the US, Warren’s prolific and versatile career includes ten novels, a collection of short stories, and numerous poems, dramas, and literary criticisms. He is also one of the most influential of the New Critics, a group that evaluated literary work by close reading and valued highly polished, difficult works characteristic of the Modernist period. Warren was taught by fellow Stuart Wright Collection author John Crowe Ransom.

Among several typescripts, manuscripts, and personal correspondence, the Stuart Wright Collection boasts more than 40 poems and over 60 pieces of literary criticism by Warren, many of which are unpublished or include revisions to original text in the poet’s own hand. This work of literary criticism preserves Warren’s remarkable views on literature. One such essay, titled “Fiction: Why Do We Read It?” shows the passion and importance he invested in fiction. On page 5, Warren quotes Freud’s assertion that the “’meagre satisfactions’ that man ‘can extract from reality leave him starving.’” What then can slate our hunger? According to Warren, it is fiction. On the same page, Warren asserts that:

In it we find, in imagination, not only the pleasure of recognizing our past, but the pleasure of experimenting with experiences which we deeply, and perhaps unwittingly, crave but which the limitations of life, the fear of consequences, or the severity of our principles forbid to us.

Thus, it is Warren’s belief that the act of reading fiction is not an escape from reality, but rather an escape to fiction (p2).

This is not the only role of fiction, however. Throughout “Fiction, Why Do We Read It?” Warren compares fiction to a daydream accessible to multiple individuals. It is this accessibility that makes fiction a social experiment of sorts. Warren explicates this concept on page 7:

To enter the publicly available day dream you have to surrender something of your own identity, have to let it be absorbed. You must identify yourself with somebody else, and accept his fate. You must take a role.

A reader may wonder at this point what value there is in surrendering a piece of their identity. After all, it is a piece of us, it is us in a sense. To sacrifice any bit of identity seems to compromise our sense of self. Warren doesn’t think so, however; in fact, he believes the opposite:

Play, when we are children, and fiction, when we are grownup, lead us, through role-taking, to a knowledge of others. But role-taking leads us, by the same token, to a knowledge of ourselves, really to the creation of the self. (9)

What Warren is saying is that to understand ourselves, we must have something to compare ourselves to, much like the relationship between light and darkness or hot and cold. Our concept of self, however, stems from within, not from perceptive senses like sight or touch. In order to make a comparison of who we are and who others are, we must take the role of someone else. At this point we can start to make statements such as “I’m not as brave as Aragorn” or “I could never fall in love with a vampire.” Comparisons such as these allow us to understand what we are and what we are not as individuals.

One would think, with the importance Warren grants fiction, that he would be an enthusiast of education in fiction writing.. In fact, Warren was adamant that fiction should not be taught in a university. On the second page of a literary essay titled “Courses in Writing,” Warren states:

It [the university] should realize that writing, except as a craft [technical and trade writing], is not to be taught – that the ideal is to create some semblance, however modest, of the natural community in which writing is learned by process of trial and error, of self-exploration of form.

Warren believes that fiction comes about from experimentation and peer review, not instruction. To instruct someone on how to compose fiction is to deny fiction its intrinsic value, supplementing it with popular styles and format in an effort to make a piece successful. To the new critics, nothing could be more villainous.

For more information on the New Critics, try the summary given here. For more insight into the mind of poet, author, and ersatz philosopher Robert Penn Warren, request one of his boxes from the Stuart Wright Collection and head to the third floor of Joyner library to enjoy.